However, those little Rhodia books have a lot of pages, and half of those
pages are more awkward to write on than others, specifically the pages at
the “top” of the notebook when it’s open and cradled in my left hand.
I did not want to number
both the “top” and “bottom” pages sequentially, so I ended up only
numbering the “bottom” pages. When I used a “top” page, I gave it the
“bottom” page’s number with an up arrow. This worked out really well
for being able to jump around in this small notebook and keep track
of what was where.

I decided to not stop there. I did not want to number all of the pages of this
little book, not knowing if I’d use it all, but I did want some things in
the back. If I wanted to move an item to the back to the book, I started
numbering from the bottom pages at the back of the book with the last page
being 1, but marked with a down arrow. And if I wanted to write on the top page,
the top page got both an up and down arrow:

This lets me use the whole book from both directions without having to
number the whole book, and while letting me throw in whatever I want at any
spot in the book and find it quickly.

This year was the first year that I went into my personal creative projects
with a real, solid plan.

What worked?

Sandstorm

I moved the majority of my cloud-based document services to a Sandstorm
instance, inside of which I ran numerous text documents, spreadsheets, wikis,
git repos, file shares, and even more. I did this for two reasons: to get my data off of
cloud providers that I don’t trust to varying degrees, and to experiment with developing
for this platformm, which I was doing earlier this year.

Checklists

There’ll be a lot of links to Cortex episodes, so
be ready. Episode 4 starts the conversation about
checklists for codifying repeatable tasks. I’ve shared a Remember The Milk
account with my wife for years now, but didn’t start really digging in until
after Cortex. I discovered that it’s possible to add subtasks to a task
and then duplicate a task, preserving the subtasks, which gave me the power of repeatable templates
I could develop over time.

Personally, I have a bunch of checklists for
packing lists and weekly reviews. For the comic business, I have monthly and
quarterly reviews mapped out, a packling list for cons, steps for posting
something to Patreon that gets promoted elsewhere, and other smaller ones.
Big win for remembering how to do stuff I don’t do too often, and for staying
motivated when I don’t feel like doing everything in a review.

Regular Reviews

I now do reviews the following times:

Friday after work for personal stuff for the past week

Monthly for personal and work stuff for the past month

Quarterly for personal and work stuff for the past quarter

These let me catch up on ongoing things, like financial tracking and such,
and give me time to reflect and pivot in different directions. They’ve been
super useful.

For the business reviews, I was, at the beginning of the year, very good about
getting out of the house to a coffee shop for an hour and planning things out
without distraction or diving into art or code or writing. I need to start
doing this again, especially as 2018 gets started.

Super-Focused Work Periods

Another Cortex recommendation. I’m now using
either All Day, Feed The Animals, or Night Ripper by Girl Talk
if I have either 70, 55, or 45 minutes available to work without distraction.
Noise-Cancelling Earbuds help too
(affiliate link, I bought them, like them a lot, and recommend them to
whoever I can).

By working this way, I can crank out several full panels of art super-fast
and stay on target with the work, with way less context switching which just
drains energy. It works great with my programming as well.
A+++, would work this way again.

What didn’t?

Having something non-kid friendly with my particular art style

I wouldn’t say Baltimore Comic-Con fell flat for me this year, but I would say
it would have gone a lot better if I had something on the table for ages 8 and
up. I’m looking to fill that gap in 2018.

Not putting in enough buffer for life stuff

A lot of crazy things happened this year which set me back in my creative
projects a lot. I don’t feel bad about not getting this stuff done – life
happens, and it’s often more important than drawing comics – but I wish that,
when I put my content plan together at the beginning of the year, I had
lowered my expectations more than I had. I would have been more focused on
the things I really wanted to get done, like Issue 3 of Wizard/Metalsmith.

Non-memetic social media promotion

I keep forgetting that longform comics like the ones I typically do just don’t
get the likes on Facebook and Instagram like single-image, easily shared
images. It works better on Tumblr, but you really have to find that niche
community to get that going. Next year’s marketing plan…well, it’s still in flux.

What’s still up for debate?

Using Tumblr to cross-promote work

187 Football Heads has been great,
but I need to figure out good ways to get folks from there to look at my other
stuff when it’s done. Still mulling this one over.

I don’t know how many others experience this issue, but when I have Krita open
and I close the lid on my Lenovo laptop w/ an nVidia card, running Kubuntu,
then open it, the art area becomes corrupted, most likely because the graphics
card’s memory becomes screwy or something during sleep. The fix is simple:
pick a layer or a few layers that cover large parts of the canvas and toggle them on and off.
This will force Krita to have to redraw these areas and get them back into
the video card’s RAM correctly. The layer on which I draw comic panel
borders is the one I ususally use, since they cover nearly the whole canvas.

I also have way too many fountain pens (is that possible?), notebooks, and other writing tools:

Three TWSBI Ecos.

A LAMY Safari.

A stylus for my laptop, pencils, etc.

I decided to design two connectable keyboard/notebook/pen holders that I could
3d print out. You can grab them off of my Thingiverse designs profile.
I printed these with orange Inland PLA and they’re quite sturdy. I even ended
up printing a few more of the keyboard holders and using them for holding
cutting boards in my kitchen.